Veronica Dell'Orto, The Alienation of the Public Sphere

Veronica Dell’Orto

The Alienation of the Public Sphere

AAD Dissertation Studio 4 2019–20

Extracts from Veronica Dell’Orto, The Alienation of the Public Sphere

Dissertation Studio 4 Bullshit, propaganda and post-truth Tutor: Jeremy Collins

School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University 2020

ORIGIN AND FUNCTION OF PUBLIC SPACE

“The piazza, the ‘place’, the square, was.. the life-centre of the city, continuing to serve, in a somewhat changed and lessened degree, the function of the agora-forum area of antiquity. The civic centre was still the principal spatial point of the built up area, the common meeting-ground of citizens; for which reason the buildings concerned with government and administration, with commercial and cultural activities, with mart and shopping, and with the religious and ceremonial side of communal living were there located. It not only provided for the public and personal needs for citizens, but in architectural and structural attractions its spatial and mass composition summed up the traditional pride of man in the pageant of cities.” 3

Earliest urban settlements are found in Ancient cities and since 500 B.C two specific significant events might be particularly recalled from Classical Greece with the figure of Agorà and Rome with Forum. Even if, different typologies of urban planning were adopted according to the cultural period status, varying from orthogonal layout to open grid, the importance of having a physical symbolic space within the core of city, the point of greatest concentration and expression of the citizen’s activities, become a concern of social, political and architectural significance. In fact, in Ancient Greece, the Agorá was a multiple function square as the commercial and political centre of the ‘polis’, where the council used to gather. This urban settlement was then adopted into the Roman planned cities, where from 200 B.C the central figure of the Forum was described as “A common market place and assembly which was sanctified with a temple” 4 .

By then, the history of urbanism has always shown the fundamental presence and physical need for an open public realm within the urban epicentre of the city. From the Middle Ages, in particular in Italy, towns were developed according to the existing Roman cities, preserving all the qualities and function that contribute to shape the idea of public space into the Piazza.

Camillo Sitte, in his book called The Art of Building Cities, described this central public moment as: “The place of the forum in cities corresponds to that of the principal room of a house. It is to the city, so to speak, the principal hall, as well arranged as it is richly furnished”. 5 Is the case of the Forum Romanum, for example, which was designed and conceived by urban builders and supported by the King, underlining the vision on political authorities in landscape production by giving grandiose impression and powerful expression to the public sphere. As a consequence, the urban configuration and growth of the city was developed according to this central space.

3

Hiorns, Frederick R., Town Building in History. London: George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd., 1956.

Sitte, Camillo, and Charles T Stewart. The Art of Building Cities City Building According to Its Artistic Fundamentals. Nueva York (Estados Unidos: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 2013.

4

Sitte, Camillo, and Charles T Stewart. The Art of Building Cities City Building According to Its Artistic Fundamentals. Nueva York (Estados Unidos: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 2013.

5

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This model of Roman urban settlement set spatial principles and concept, like the coordination and direction among urban buildings and spaces, that have been standardised and adopted in most of the cities around Europe. Foreign words as “place” in French, “plaza” in Spanish and “piazza” in Italian, were adopted to describe this public dwelling. Even if the social context and political dynamics of the Middle Ages were similar to the Roman period, in terms of urban arrangement of cities, the scale of planning moved from monumental architecture to human scale. A new concept of formality emerged and was dictated by canons as ‘proportion’ and ’set view’. In fact, in Italy, a new configuration of central open space took the name of ‘Piazza’, noun forged after the construction of Piazza del Campo in Siena, which symbolised, the highest urban democratic development of public dwelling 7 . A democratic public space could be defined as “An ideal for all the public spaces, is a place that is publicly owned, universally accessible, both physically and in perception; allows for a diversity of voices and users in all the stages of design and occupancy; allows for flexibility of use; is freely used by all individuals and encourages freedom of speech and expression” 8. A statement which clearly affected important considerations as: on one side geometrical principles like form, internal development, adjoining lands and building uses and on the other the relationship between political, religious and public institutions.

The democratic public space has a strong influence within the historical form, cultural function and institutions as governmental, religious and commercial. Therefore, the urban configuration of space, especially in the Middle Ages, derives from a layered series of spatial concepts and social functions mainly dictated by politic. Religious institution lost its power and served only the function of processions and celebrations. Piazza del Campo, has been functionally classified as central multiple function square and, in this abstract, will be analysed under spatial and functional classification. It is important to notice that, while physical conditions as location and form are permanent throughout the years, the function might be changed according to external influences dictated by political, economical and urban expansion needs.

[Fig. 02] Piazza del Campo, Siena (Italy)

7

Guidoni, Enrico, ed. Le piazze: lo spazio pubblico dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea. Storia della città 54–56. Milano: Elemond, 1993.

Conger Kevin, Democratic Public Space, CMG Intern Research Summer 2017 [online] Available from: https://www.cmgsite.com/democratic-public-space/ 8

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MODERN TIMES

In the light of Habermas’s theoretic analysis of the transformation of the public sphere from the Industrial Age to the Modern Society, the phenomena described in the previous chapter can be associated to the controversial concept and definition of public space in the capitalist society and elite system of the Nineteenth Century. Considering that, in the early Nineteenth Century, the commercial culture used to be consumed in private houses and through medias, whose didn’t required spaces for public meetings, debates or discussions, the city landscapes of present times, along with the definition of what is now meant by public architecture, has been shaped according to the aesthetic standards and gleaming forms superimposed by the idealistic world of capitalistic system.

A general understanding of politics in relation to the public character in architecture of past societies, varying from Ancient Greek until the Industrial Revolution, has already been discussed above, and within the Greek period, it has been highlighted how the public sphere constitutes a special moment for the community through a more exciting sense and involvement of political institution. In the Nineteenth Century, even though the mutual dependency between the political and public sphere still suggest a strong connection between the two disciplines, the importance and power of political and economic institutions overturn their conditions against the respect of the public order, which has been completely lost.

By reflecting the politics of capitalism and the transformation of urban structures in order to respond to markets demand, public lands are now controlled by private owners, rather than by the state, which acts almost as public authority. As a consequence, the out-of-context architecture standards superimposed during the Nineteenth Century, whose seem to suggest that the great innovative buildings are accessible only to a specific audience or class of activities, led to the disappearance of social values as diversity of forms, resources, lifestyle and cultural heritage

25.

This phenomena can be described as an

alienation of urban elements within the modern configuration of a city’s landscape. For example, the architect Mies Van Der Rohe, one of the founders of the principles of architectural modernism, designed in 1921 the first skyscraper named Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. With the aim to achieve a structure pictured as high-reaching steel skeletons, this new typology of metropolitan architecture evokes in the spectators an awful sense of power, strength and durability, probably given by its monumentality and materiality, whose combined together seem to satisfy all the characteristic of the machine-age look. Announced through the triumph of the skyscraper, architecture has now been shifted towards a new commercial elite system dictated by ruling order, control, purity and rationalism.

25 Mihajlov, Vladimir. Architectural design in a new social order: re-exploring the reasons for application of spatial standards. Original scientific article: University of Belgrade, 2012

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[Fig. 05] Le Corbusier, Villa Radieuse, functionalist plan for a Utopian ‘Radiant City’, 1930

‘.. But as in the expression ‘public building’ the term need not refer to general accessibility; the building does not even have to be open to public traffic. ‘Public buildings’ simply house State Institutions and as such are ‘public’. The State is the ‘public authority’.’ 26 On a bigger scale, the urban configuration and arrangement of spaces of the newborn linear and ordered metropolis have been shaped according to functionalist plans for utopian cities, characterised by a more rational built environment abstractly inspired by, for example, vertical rigid-iron grid and symmetrical blocky schemes. Led by the capitalist bourgeois, defined as profit-making form of organisation27 and through the attempt to create privileged spaces, the planners have been forced to relocate the public open realm under different forms, as for example, the Atrium: an interiorised public space on private property28 . Clearly stating that, in a system of absolutistic control, the technological innovations and economic interests were more important than the needs of the community, originally founded on certain social principles, the machine has been prioritised over the people. As a consequence, the dominant value of the society together with the public function of architecture, has completely disappeared.

Habermas, Jürgen, and Thomas Burger. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.

Reprinted. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.

26

David Milne. Architecture, politics and the public realm. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Revue canadienne de théorie politique et sociale, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-2 (Winter-Spring, 1981) 27

Missac, Pierre, and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Walter Benjamin’s Passages. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995.

28

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‘ .. Disengaged entirely from the exterior life of the city, and lit only by a large, continuous skylight above. Its interior constitutes an entire universe. Since the streets outside are dangerous for pedestrians, this is at once a refuge and a city unto itself: a locus on social activity, the place to both be see and be seen. Its vertical enclosure appears to be absolutely symmetrical, while its ceiling consists of nothing by glass and steel.’ 29

The figure of the Atrium completely fulfilled this discrepancy between the public and the private, the individual from the social collectivity, by creating a disorienting space whose boundary between interior and exterior, inclusion and exclusion, are hard to be defined. This particular pseudo space has been described by Walter Benjamin, in his book The Arcades Project written between 1927 and 1940, as a recent invention of industrial luxury 30 and it reached its apogee in the latter half of Nineteenth Century during the Postmodernism, alongside technological improvements in the construction of the skyscrapers. The first Atrium recorded was designed by the architect and developer John C. Portman with the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Atlanta between 1963 and 1967. This new prototype of sheltered interior public space, located at the main entrance of the building, aspired to be a total space, a complete world, almost a miniature city which was designed to (re-)create an artificial sense of community, comfort and well-being. This artificial collective place where individuals could meet and congregate aim to (re-)make something like what was portrayed as ‘piazza’ during the Middle Age. For this reason, the Atrium will be investigated under the same terms of form and function. It has to be said that both concept and purpose of this pseudo space have been influenced by this particular historical moment in the development of late-capitalism which was characterised by a complicated relationship among three key disciplines: socio-economic transformation, subjective experience and architectural production.

‘evoke and enhance positive human reactions and to created the feeling of an outdoor piazza on the interior, in which people can participate in a dynamic panorama of events within the controlled parameters of the atrium’ 31

Characterized by an incredible vertical high space varying from two to four storeys, this central glazed void erected on reinforced columns had the desire to alleviate the pressure given by the multi-stories buildings and industrial settlements of the condensed urban configuration of a central district. Accessible by automatic monumental and glazed doors, the internal organisation space of the Atrium has been approached through an overlap of spatial elements, such as corridors, balconies and sitting areas, whose aim is to re-create the harmonious environment of casual open air spaces. This exploded hall transparent box, clearly designed to

29

Joseph M. Watson, The Arcade and the Atrium [The Culture of Glass, Arch 712-002/812-003], 2013

30

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

31

Paolo Riani, Paul Goldberger, and John Portman, John Portman, (Milan: L’Arcaedizioni, 1990), p. 29 20

simulate and stimulate activities and phenomenas of social interaction, such as conversation, exchange and cooperation among the visitors, has been integrated with mechanised systems of circulation, lighting and ventilation. In addition, in order to promote comfort and well-being, dynamic elements from the outside world like trees, plants and water fountains have been brought inside this glazed and closed box. The will to re-create something characterised by natural flow and casualty, led the planners to delineate a rigid design scheme with the aim of controlling and monitoring the human motion. Through, for example, the introduction of elevators and escalators, the man has now become a product of technological improvement.

Perfectly suited to the capitalist mind of absolute control and power, this space gave life to what can be described as a surrealist human aquaria 32: an independent urban realm, detached from the mass of the city, which offers its own program, rules and politics, and it is accessible only to a very limited typology of community.

[Fig. 06] John Portman, Lobby of Hyatt Regency, San Francisco (California), 1973

32

Louis Aragon, Nightwalker [Le Paysan de Paris], tr. Frederick Brown (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 10 21

The strong and rigid framework made of a particular combination of spatial arrangements within an extreme artificial environment helped to define the function of this space and the social phenomena of exclusivity as well as inclusivity behind it. Therefore, there is an important relationship to be considered between the nature of the space described above and what is demanded in order that this architecture can(not) be called as a public space. Is the case of accessibility. The Atrium would seem to function as a connective space between two parts of the building, the pedestrian route from the outside and the above exclusive space from the inside. If internally it provides a safe passage and space for corporate tenants and guests, from the outside, its glazed walls and entrances draw a line between what can be seen and what can be accessed, ensuring that the ‘others’ are being kept out. In so doing, a boundary, which is difficult to be defined, is drawn between a space which is made for being seen but not accessible to the community.

Unrestricted only to a limited audience, like expensive things in a boutique, it functions exclusively to exalt the capitalist bourgeoise elite. This hermetic container sealed from the interior against the real, reflects the socio-cultural context of late Nineteenth Century and highlighted the discrimination between classes and in particular, how the individual tends to be divided and alienated from the social collectivity. The glamorised interior exists only for the sake of the business rather than the human and it lies in the will of create a space devoted to the public. The social communication between labours of this pseudo space have been transformed into a relationship between things, where technological innovation and economic interest are prioritised over the people. Everything is programmed and controlled like a set in a theatre.

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‌ School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University 2020

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